“And you’re an authority on ghosts?” Brook asked.
“Trust me on this.”
Ghosts might be better. I had this sick little feeling in my stomach that said this was something bad. Something really bad.
I could call Kate and ask her what would cause the magic of two different colors to show up. The colors weren’t blended or flowing into one another the way Kate’s colors did. They were distinct. Separate. Together but not mixing.
Ehhh. There was some sort of answer at the end of that thought, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Calling Kate wouldn’t be happening. This was my little mission and I would get it done on my own.
I tried to think like Kate. She always said that people were the key to any mystery. Someone somehow did something that caused Ashlyn to hide and Lisa really didn’t want me to keep looking for her. “Did Ashlyn have a best friend?”
Brook paused. “She and Sheila hung out sometimes, but mostly she kept to herself.”
“Can we go talk to Sheila?”
Brook heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Sure.”
“You’re leaving? In that case, Brook, hold this for me for a second.” Barka stuck the pen he’d been rolling between his fingers at Brook. She took it. Bright light sparked and Brook dropped the pen and shook her hand.
Barka guffawed.
“Moron!” Brook’s eyes shone with a dangerous glint behind her glasses. She marched out of the class. I followed her.
We went down the hallway toward the staircase.
“He likes you,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” Brook growled.
Sheila turned out to be the exact opposite of Ashlyn. Where Ashlyn’s picture showed a petite cutesy girly-girl, Sheila was muscular. Not manly, but really cut. We caught her in the locker room, just as she was going out to play volleyball. It’s not often you see a girl with a six-pack.
She sat on a wooden bench by the small wooden room inside the locker room that said sauna on it. I wondered what the heck sauna meant. It was a first-class locker room; the floor was tile, three showers, two bathrooms, “sauna,” large lockers. The clean tile smelled faintly of pine. Special locker room for special snowflakes.
“I don’t know why Ashlyn pulled this stunt.” Sheila pulled on her left sock.
“Was she worried about anything?”
“She did seem kind of jumpy.”
“Did she have a problem with Lisa?”
Sheila paused with the shoe on one foot. “Lisa the Dud?”
Okay, so I didn’t like Lisa. But if they called me that, I’d get pissed off really quick, too. “Lisa who senses Ashlyn’s ‘presence.’”
“Not really.” Sheila shook her head. “One time someone left a paw print on Ashlyn’s desk. She got really upset.”
“What kind of paw print?”
“Wolf,” Brook said. “I remember that. She scrubbed her desk for ten minutes.”
“How big was the print and when did this happen?”
“Big,” Sheila said. “Like bowl-sized. It was about a week ago or so.”
Prints that large could indicate a shapeshifter, a werewolf, possibly a werejackal or a werecoyote.
“If anybody had a problem with her, it would be Yu Fong,” Sheila said.
“He is the only eighteen-year-old sophomore we have,” Brook said. “He’s this odd Chinese guy.”
“Odd how?”
“He’s an orphan,” Sheila said. “His parents were murdered.”
“I thought they died in a car accident,” Brook said.
“Well, whatever happened, happened,” Sheila told me. “For some reason he didn’t go to school. I heard he was in prison, but whatever. Anyway, he showed up one day, talked to Master Gendun, and got himself admitted as a student. He tested out of enough credits to start as a sophomore. He’s dangerous.”
“Very powerful,” Brook said.
“Uber-magic,” Sheila said. “You can feel it coming off of him sometimes. Makes my skin itch.”
Brook nodded. “Not sure exactly what sort of magic he has, but whatever it is, it’s significant. There are three other Chinese kids in school and they follow Yu Fong around like bodyguards. You can’t even talk to him.”
“And Ashlyn had a problem with him?” Somehow I couldn’t picture Ashlyn deliberately picking a fight with this guy.
“She was terrified of him,” Sheila said. “One time he tried to talk to her and she freaked out and ran off.”
Okay, then. Next target—the mysterious Yu Fong.
* * *
The search for the “odd Chinese guy” took us to the cafeteria, where according to Brook, this uber-magic user had second-shift lunch. Brook led the way. I followed her through the double doors and paused. A large skylight poured sunshine into the huge room, filled with round metal tables and ornate chairs. At the far wall, the buffet table stretched, manned by several servers in white. Fancy.
The students picked up their plates and carried them to different tables. Some sat, talking. To the right, several voices laughed in unison.
To the left, a wide doorway allowed a glimpse of a smaller sunroom. In its center, right under the skylight, grew a small tree with red leaves, all but glowing in the sunshine. A table stood by the tree and a young guy sat in a chair, leaning on the table, reading a book. He was too old to be called a boy, but too young to be called a man, and his face was inhumanly beautiful.
I stood and stared.
I’d seen some handsome guys before. This guy . . . he was magic. His dark hair was brushed away from his high forehead, falling back without a trace of a curl. His features were flawlessly perfect, his face strong and masculine, with a contoured jaw, a tiny cleft in the chin, full lips, and high cheekbones. His eyebrows, dark and wide, bent to shield his eyes, large, beautiful, and very, very dark. Not black, but solid brown.
I blinked, and my power kicked in. The guy was wrapped in pale blue. Not quite silver, but with enough of it to dilute the color to a shimmering blue gray. Divinity. He was either a priest or an object of worship, and looking at him, I was betting on the latter. Glowing like this, he reminded me of one of those celestial beings of Chinese mythology they made me learn about in my old school. He looked like a god.
“That’s him,” Brook said. “And his guards.”
Two boys sat at a second table a few feet away. “I thought you said there were three,” I murmured.
“There are—Hui has algebra right now.”
I scanned the two guys sitting next to Yu Fong—plain blue—and let go of my sensate vision. His face was distracting enough. I didn’t need the glow.
“I’ll go ask him if he’ll talk to you,” Brook said.
“Why don’t we go together?” They took the pecking order really seriously in this place.
Brook compressed her lips. “No, they know me.”
She made it about two-thirds of the way and then one of Yu Fong’s guards peeled himself from the chair and blocked her way. Brook said something, he shook his head, and she turned around and came back to me.
Of course, it was a no. And now they knew I was coming.
Well, you have to work with what you’ve got.
I raised my hands and wiggled my fingers at the uber-magic guy. He continued reading his book. I waved again and started toward him, a nice big smile on my face. I’ve seen Kate do this, and if I didn’t screw it up, it would work.
The first guard stepped forward, blocking my path. I gave him my cute smile, looked past him, and pointed to myself, as if I was being summoned over and couldn’t believe it. He glanced over his shoulder to check Yu Fong’s face. I drove my fist hard into his gut. The boy folded around my fist with a surprised gasp. I slammed my hand onto his head, driving his head down. Face meet knee. Boom! The impact reverberated through my leg.
I shoved him aside and kept moving. The second bodyguard jumped to his feet. I swiped the nearest chair, swung it, and hit him with it just as he was coming up.
The c
hair connected to the side of his head with a solid crunch. I let go and he stumbled back with the chair on top of him. I stepped past him and landed in the spare chair at the table.
The uber-guy slowly raised his gaze from his book and looked at me.
Whoa.
There was a kind of serious arrogance in his eyes, a searing intensity and determination. Living on the street gives you a sixth sense about those things. You learn to read people. Reading him was easy: He was powerful and arrogant, and he imposed control on everything he saw, including himself. He had been through life’s vicious grinder and had come out stronger for it. He would never let you know what he was thinking and you would always be on thin ice.
I touched the surface of the table with the tip of my finger. “Safe.”
There was some scrambling behind me. Yu Fong made a small motion with his hand and the noises stopped. I’d won the right to an audience. Wheee!
He tilted his head and studied me with those dark eyes.
I smelled incense. Yep, definitely incense, a strong, slightly sweet smoke. “I always wondered how would one address an object of worship? Should I call you ‘the lord of ten thousand years,’ ‘the holy one,’ or the ‘son of heaven’?” Dali, one of the shapeshifters, was teaching me the beginnings of Asian mythologies. Unfortunately, that’s as far as we got, since I only just started.
“I am not an object.” His voice was slightly accented. “You may call me Yu.”
Simple enough.
“Is there something you want?” he asked.
“My name is Julie Lennart.” Might as well go with the big gun. Most people didn’t know the Beast Lord’s last name so if he recognized it, it would be a good indication that he was some sort of magic heavyweight.
“It is a weighty name for someone so small.” Yu Fong smiled a nice easy smile. He would smile like that while he watched a cute puppy play with a butterfly or while his flunkies were torturing his enemy. Take your pick. “The Beast Lord commands fifteen hundred shapeshifters.”
“More or less.” It was more, but he didn’t need to know that.
His dark eyes fixed on me. “One day my kingdom will be greater.”
Ha-ha! Yeah, right. “I’m here with Master Gendun’s knowledge and at his request.”
He didn’t say anything. The metal table under my fingers felt warm. I rested more of my hand on it. Definitely warm. The cafeteria was air-conditioned and even now, with magic up, the air stayed pretty cool, which meant the metal table should’ve been cold.
“A girl disappeared. She was a small girl. Shy. Her name is Ashlyn.”
No reaction. The table was definitely getting warmer.
“She was scared of you.”
“I don’t kill little girls.”
“What makes you think she was killed? I didn’t say anything about her being killed.”
He leaned forward slightly. “If I take notice of something that offends me, I choose to ignore it or kill it. I ignored her.”
Boy, this dude was conceited. “Why did she offend you?”
“I’ve never threatened her. She had no reason to cringe in my presence. I don’t expect you to understand.”
I thought hard on why he would find an obvious display of fear offensive.
“When she cringed, you felt insulted. You had no intention of hurting her, so by showing fear, she implied that your control over your power was imperfect.”
Yu’s eyes widened slightly.
“I’m the ward of the Beast Lord,” I told him. “I spend a lot of time with arrogant control freaks.”
The table under my hand was almost too hot to keep touching it. I held on. “Ashlyn annoyed you. You said you ignored her. You didn’t say anything about your bodyguards. Did they do something to Ashlyn to make her disappear?”
His face was the picture of disdain, which was just a polite way of saying that he would’ve liked to sneer at me but it was beneath him. I’ve seen this precise look on the Beast Lord’s face. If he and Curran ever got into the same room, Kate’s head would explode.
I waited but he didn’t say anything. Apparently Yu decided to not dignify it with an answer.
Thin tendrils of smoke escaped from his book. The table near him must have been much hotter than on my end. That had to be something because the metal was now hurting my fingers.
“If I find out that you hurt Ashlyn, I’ll hurt you back,” I said.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Do. Your book is smoking.”
He picked it up. I slowly raised my hand, blew on my skin, and got up to leave.
“Why do you care?” he asked.
“Because none of you do. Look around you—a girl is missing. A girl you saw in class every day got so scared by something, she had to hide from it. Nobody is looking for her. All of you are just going on with your business as usual. You have all this power and you didn’t lift a finger to help her. You just sit there, reading your book, comfy behind your bodyguards, and demonstrate how awesome your magic is by heating up your table. Somebody has to find her. I decided to be that somebody.”
I couldn’t tell if any of this was sinking in.
“True strength isn’t in killing—or ignoring—your opponent, it’s in having the will to shield those who need your protection.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Who said that?”
“I did.” I walked away.
Brook was staring at me.
“Come on,” I told her, loud enough for him to hear the derision in my voice. “We’re done here.”
* * *
In the hallway I walked to the window and exhaled. The nerve. All that power, all that magic boiling in him, and he just sat there. Didn’t do a thing to help Ashlyn. He didn’t care.
Brook cleared her throat behind me.
“I just need a minute.”
I looked outside at the courtyard, enclosed by the square building of the school. It was a really large courtyard. No place to hide, though: benches, flowers, twisted stone paths. A single tree rose toward the northern end of it, surrounded by a maze of concentric flower beds, spreading from it like one of those little handheld puzzle games where you have to roll the ball into a hole through a plastic labyrinth.
“You’re wrong,” Brook said behind me. “You know what, we all got problems. Just because I didn’t look for Ashlyn doesn’t make me a bad person. Do you have any idea how competitive the Mage Academy exams are? Getting the right credit is taking up all my time. And I don’t even know you! Why do I have to justify myself to you?”
The flowers were in full bloom. Blue asters, delicate bearded irises, cream and yellow, purplish spiderwort—I had a lot of herbology in my old school. Normal for early June. The tree had tiny little buds just beginning to unfurl into gauzy white and pink petals.
“It’s not like I even knew her that well. I don’t see why I should be held accountable for whatever problem made her hide. If she’d come to me and said, ‘Brook, I’m in trouble,’ I would’ve helped her.”
“What is that tree?”
“What?”
“The tree down in the yard.” I pointed to it. “What kind of tree is it?”
Brook blinked. “I don’t know. It’s the dead tree. You can’t get to it now anyway, not with the magic up, because the flower garden is warded. Listen, I’m not proud that I didn’t look for Ashlyn. All I am saying is that maybe I didn’t look for her and I probably should have, but I was busy.”
I bet it was an apple tree. Some apple trees bloomed late, but most of them flowered in April and May. It was June now.
“How long has that tree been dead?”
“As long as I can remember. I’ve been in this school for three years and it was always dead. I don’t know why they don’t cut it down. Are you listening to me?”
“It’s flowering.”
Brook blinked. “What?”
“The tree is blooming. Look.”
Brook looked at the window. “Huh.”
Perfect hundred in botany. Apples in the drawer. Wolf print on the desk. Terrified of a boy who creates heat, because where there is smoke, there is fire. Blooming apple tree that has been dead for years.
It all lined up in my head into a perfect arrow pointing to the tree.
“Can we get down there?”
Brook was staring at the tree. “Yes.”
Two minutes later I marched out of the side door into the inner yard and down the curved stone path. I was fifty feet from the tree when I sensed magic in front of me. I stopped and snapped into the sensate vision. A wall of magic rose in front of me, glowing lightly with pale silver. A ward, a defensive spell designed to keep out intruders. Currents of power coursed through it.
Some wards glowed with translucent color, both a barrier and a warning that the barrier existed, and walking into it would hurt. This one was invisible to someone without my vision. And judging by the intensity of the magic, touching it would hurt you bad enough to leave you writhing in pain for a few minutes or knock you out completely.
I turned and walked along the ward, with Brook following me. The spell followed the curved flower bed.
“What’s the point of the ward?”
“Nobody knows,” Brook said.
“Did you ever ask Gendun?”
“I have, actually. He just smiled.”
Great.
Ahead, a two-foot-wide gap severed the circle of the ward. I stopped by it, looked through, and saw another ward. This was a magic maze, with rings inside rings of wards and in the center of it all was the apple tree.
“She’s watching us,” Brook hissed.
“What?”
“Second-floor window, on the left.”
I looked up and saw Lisa looking at us. Our stares connected. Lisa’s face had this strange mix of emotions, part realization, part fear. She had figured me out. She understood that I saw the ward somehow and I knew about the apple tree, and she was afraid now. It couldn’t be me she was scared of. I wasn’t that scary. Was she scared that I would find Ashlyn?
A bright green glow burst from Lisa’s back. It snapped into the silhouette of an eight-foot-tall wolf. The beast stared at me with eyes of fire.
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